We're ready for the battles to come

We are living in a time of great turmoil and uncertainty. Over the course of just one year, we have witnessed a massive assault on the federal government that is wreaking havoc on public services long considered vital to the national order and led to the firings of hundreds of thousands of federal employees. 

Early on, the Trump administration began issuing warnings of massive cutbacks in federal funding to state and local governments. The targets and the timing and the amounts all vary, but there’s little doubt that the threats are real and the potential impact devastating.

Over that same time span, far less visible to the naked eye, there have been dozens of deals done, taxes cut, favors handed out—all without appropriate oversight—in order to further enrich the already super-rich of our country.   

AFSCME represents several thousand employees in the federal government and our national union has been in the forefront of the legal battles challenging the ferocious assault on federal programs and workers. Those legal clashes are ongoing.

Here in Illinois, we have refused to be deterred by the chaos emanating from D.C. Our most important mission is to continue to work every day to improve members’ lives, to build a fierce fighting force that can face whatever attacks come, and to stand in solidarity to uphold labor’s firm conviction: An injury to one is an injury to all.

Council 31 members can be very proud of what we accomplished over the past year. Dozens of local unions sat across the bargaining table from their employers to negotiate new contracts. They stirred up member activism, took to the picket lines, and even prepared to go out on strike—determined to secure the wages, benefits and rights that build our union ever stronger and make our members’ lives so much better.

In every instance—some 70 contracts in all—we made real gains!    

We continued to build our power on the political and legislative fronts. We helped to forge a public sector labor coalition that put the urgency of fixing Tier 2 pensions on the legislative radar. And we enacted a number of new laws that will greatly expand the rights and protections of union members. Moreover, we blocked a number of bills that would have reduced our rights, jeopardized our jobs, or fostered privatization of public services.

We were able to make those gains on so many fronts in large measure because we have continued to grow our union. More than a dozen new units—ranging from school bus drivers, to librarians, to lawyers—have joined our AFSCME family. And we made sure that every new employee in our own workplaces understands the vital importance of being a union member.

All of that progress, however, is now put in jeopardy by the destructive policies emanating from the White House and Congress. We saw the impact almost immediately when our Tier 2 reform legislation hit a brick wall last May as state legislators began to grasp the harsh reality of massive cutbacks in federal funding to vital state services.

The impact of budget cuts on a scale never seen before is still hard to comprehend.

What we do understand all too well is that Illinois could lose as much as $1 billion in federal funding over the next year. It will be very tough for the state to raise enough new revenues to replace that kind of money. So essential programs to help those in need, such as child care, TANF, SNAP and Medicaid are all in jeopardy. What’s more, the jobs of thousands of public employees, many of them AFSCME members, are also in jeopardy as public bodies are forced to make hard decisions about how to allocate their drastically reduced revenues.  

We also understand that the American labor movement now has a large target painted on its back. We have seen how the Trump administration has acted unilaterally—and surely, illegally—to terminate all union contracts in effect in the federal workforce and to strip more than a million employees of their collective bargaining rights.

All of this in just one year! We really cannot even imagine what the next three will bring. But we do know that the playbook is Project 2025, which explicitly urges congressional action to ban all public employee unions at all levels of government. In other words, the very survival of public sector labor unions is on the line.

It’s up to all of us to continue to move forward into this uncharted territory—to be better prepared, more determined, and more unified than ever; to be ready to stand up for ourselves and for each other at every turn; and to join with other unions to defend fundamental labor rights.

No doubt we’re in for some very rough times—unlike anything we’ve ever experienced. But there is one thing we know for certain: AFSCME is a fighting union. We’ve shown that time and again. We took on Bruce Rauner and became a national symbol of fightback. We built our PEOPLE program into one of the most effective in the nation. We’ve demonstrated that we’re not afraid to stand up to any employer to secure the contracts we deserve.

So let’s lean into the fight. Let’s be prepared for what we know is coming. Let’s put aside all the petty things that can preoccupy us and focus on the very real threats that can destroy us. Let’s bring our courage and determination to the forefront. And let’s make our core value—fairness for all—our clarion call and our guiding light. That’s our challenge for 2026. I have no doubt that we can rise to meet it.